Re: Questions on printing

[Patrick Wiseman <pwiseman@mindspring.com>]

I'm going to snip a lot - I hope that doesn't offend someone's notion of
what's appropriate here.  In particular, I'm snipping most of the KDE
stuff, as I don't use it.

On Mon, 19 Aug 2002, Neal Lippman wrote:

> On Monday 19 August 2002 14:14, Donald R. Spoon wrote:
> > Neal Lippman wrote:

[...]

> >   I also have installed the cupsys-bsd package and most programs that
> > use "lpr" will print correctly without modification.

[...]

> Yeah. Getting a unified approach to printing under Linux remains a problem; 
> it remains harder than it needs to be. 

No - CUPS really is it, I think (so long as you have a compatible
printer).

> The problem with piping the printing from various apps through kprinter is 
> that you wind up with two successive dialogs every time you go to print from 
> apps like Mozilla - the Mozilla provided dialog, followed by kprinter's 
> dialog. An advantage to piping through kprinter is, however, that you can 
> select various printers that kde understands, including cups, etc, in that 
> fashion.

So kprinter (a KDE app I presume) is obviously broken.  With CUPS, you
just let apps print to where they want to print, whether it be lp or lpr.

> An alternative that I hit upon after reading your email was to just use the 
> print command "lp" instead of "lpr" as the former sends the print information 
> to cups while the latter looks for the lpr system. Both (lp and kprinter) 
> worked fine for me from mozilla - but with lp you don't get the ability to 
> select a printer.

Have _you_ installed cupsys-bsd?  If you do, lpr goes that way too.  (I
just got this myself a couple of days ago.)

> What's really needed is for all apps to share a common print dialog

That's really not necessary - the "dialog" part, I mean - if your apps all
print somewhere plausible, CUPS handles it, if fully and properly
installed.

(And that "common" thing I'm sure sounds fine to those of you who use KDE
or GNOME, which provide all sorts of things in "common", but I use
neither, and am happy for my various apps to have their own
idiosyncracies.)

Patrick

-- 
Patrick Wiseman                               pwiseman@mindspring.com
Linux user #17943                             *Google First, Ask Later*
      With 39 left to play, and up 19 in the loss column,
                the Braves' Magic Number is 21!